And to this long dead conversation, I will suggest Phillip K. Dick’s “The Man In the High Castle.”

It’s an alternative history, and I finally got to it some 20 years after first reading PKD. I don’t know why I kept skipping that one. It’s actually a crazy, beautifully written book about Eastern philosophy and American culture … I think.

On the world economy side, I see a lot of crisis management going on (central banks around the world actually coordinating on raising interest rates and tightening money supplies, perhaps as a step to doing something about the massive imbalances in finance and trade between the US and Asia; economies around the world adjusting surprisingly well to higher oil prices…), but no crisis. And although I’ve read some about a possible Asian-Latin American political coalition (bringing Russia, Brazil, India, and China closer together as a counterweight to US, EU, and OPEC), such coalitions seem pretty ad hoc and defensive to me right now. Everyone still needs the US to be what William Greider has called the ‘buyer of last resort’ in the world economy and seems to be willing to use the US’s own tools (WTO, especially) to contest American economic policies through institutional means.

So what am I missing? Why is the world’s leading power acting like a trigger-happy rising power? Is there a lot less oil out there than the DOE is letting on? Are US elites really scared of major social upheaval in the wake of a major economic crisis or terrorist attack, and field testing their militaries’ urban warfare/counterinsurgency tactics for potential future use in U.S. cities? (Google “domestic militarization” and think about the rapid expansion of the US prison system in the last generation.) Everything I try to come up with sounds to me like the plot of a bad airport political thriller or a paranoid conspiracy theory. It comes down to the fact that I really don’t get the extremism of the Bush administration (Yoo/Addington/Cheney). Maybe it’s time to reread Silko’s Almanac of the Dead…..

Best question posed on all of the Internets yet this year.

It’s not like Clinton somehow posed a mortal threat to capitalism, General Motors, or Exxon.

If I had to guess, it was a combination of greed and carelessness. Remember, big money capitalists helped put a certain partially-mustachioed loon in charge of Germany a few decades back. And that turned out swell for the big capitalists, at least at first. And after a while, the big capitalists were along for the ride and not calling the shots. And then the US Army Air Force bombed the crap out of their factories. (And a lot of people died, too.)

Anyhow, I would wager that many people took Lyndon Baines Bush to be a different fellow on first inspection than he’s turned out to be. There’s business-friendly, and then there’s stupid-as-a-post. Businessmen in the USA do not exactly have a sterling record at predicting the way the future will work (see, for example, General Motors). Enormous power does not equate to wisdom.

That said, to get back to the counterfactual presented here, I’d say a quick read of Kinzer’s Overthrow and Klare’s Blood and Oil suggests that where there’s oil, there’s any number of ready rationales for U.S. intervention. So the Chilean-financed attack would have had to have ties to Venezuela or Colombia or Mexico–no wait, Cheney would have had to make ties to one or both to justify an invasion–perhaps some convenient conspiracy among the Latin American Left , from the Zapatistas to the Colombian narco-rebels to Chavez….

In any case, the main issue the original counterfactual raises for me is, why this shift into U.S. militarism and almost-imperialism this century? What was so dangerous about ’90s neoliberalism’s workings to U.S. elites that led the neoconservatives to repudiate it so strongly? Why the return of the imperial presidency this century?

Adolf Hitler migrates to America after World War I and becomes a science fiction writer.

WOW! I love this book!

I don’t think I’ve had an aneurysm … no, not so far as I can tell. And I don’t mean to cloy. Cloying people really suck.

But counterfactual history is, for the most part, utter crap. That’s not cloying, that’s just a fact. And when it’s done by allegedly-mainstream historians like Niall Ferguson, counterfactual history is even crappier.

I’m sure Bellatrys thanks you for your wise guidance.

I think he/she/it is spot on – the condecension dripping from stickler is positively cloying. Counterfactuals are but one tool among many as a means of exploring various ideas. Try to avoid an aneurysm expressing your disdain for the concept.

Bellatrys, in future please try READING the post before commenting. Pretty please?

“If the Black Death had wiped out Europe (hey, here’s a thought: it almost wiped out half of Europe in real life!), then Asia would have discovered America and the Aztecs would have died from the same damned smallpox the Spaniards actually brought.”

But would the Chinese have declared war? Would they have burned every book they could get their hands on? Would Mayan writing have been wiped out?

I don’t know nearly enough about Asian history in that period to answer that question.

I’m actually starting to wonder if counterfactuals ARE entirely wanking; There’s a prevalent myth here in America that the European conquest of the country was inevitable, but it really wasn’t; It was the result of several different factors, and removing any single one would signifigantly change history.

The writing systems of central America were destroyed for exclusively religious reasons; Mexican scholars were interested in them, and the constant efforts to translate and communicate native histories show that they weren’t destroyed to demoralise the populace.

Eliminate Christian views on heresy and there’s a VERY good chance that Mayan writing would never have been lost.

You can do this with all kinds of other things, too; Eliminate Spains Tarascan allies and it’s quite possible the Aztecs would’ve won.

The same kind of thing applies all over North America.

But, I’m honestly not sure that’s true. You’ve probably all seen me explain that previously in comments so I won’t re-tread it here.

I must call bullshit on this one. With imperialism, there’s going to be atrocities. That is a feature of imperialism and war even today (how many African con. Remember that Arabs engaged in the African slave trade long before white Europeans did, and that while Islam does preach tolerance towards Christians, Jews and Zarathustrians (a doctrine occasionally ignored by various Muslim rulers or mobs), I doubt Mexico’s indigenous people count. Under pagan Roman Spain, it’d probably be worse, though Rome might have let the natives keep their religion.

This article contained an interesting take on things:

“A really provocative question, not addressed by any historian I know of, is this. How much of the imperialism that was so prevalent in European history since 1500 is grounded in the fact that Europe was itself a target of imperialism for much of its history? First we have the imperialism of Rome and the Germanic invaders. Then Arab imperialism overwhelmed the Greek-speaking Levant, the Romanized coast of North Africa and advanced into Spain. The Vikings and Magyars harassed Europe from the north and east. Turkish invasion of Byzantine Anatolia was a root cause of the Crusades, and the Mongol invasion of 1241-2 barely avoided exterminating Europe altogether. Finally, even as Europeans were planting empires of their own, the Turks were advancing in the Balkans. Is it entirely inexplicable that Europeans, once they got the upper hand, would assume that imperialism was natural and become imperialists themselves?”

The anti-fandom self-righteous smugness that’s starting to take over around here to the exclusion of all common sense is itself *extremely* wankeriffic. Don’t y’all dislocate your arms patting yourselves on the…backs, let’s say in the interests of politesse, in your mutual, um, admiration circle.

Although I must say Retardo’s opening post has an excellent point. It’s quite disturbing to think about, as a passing conjecture. However, when one makes a career off of playing “What if?” it’s a bit creepy.

Though I’ll sheepishly admit that I read Fatherland and enjoyed it.

There. I said it.

But even that book was crap.

Maybe I dreamed that. Either way, it was pretty funny.

Yes, and the main joke was Spartacus going ‘wow!’ and the pilot deadpanning, ‘never been up in a plane before, huh?’

The comments about the Civil War remind me of that e-mail that circulates, threatening would-be visitors to the South with violence if said visitors fail to show the proper respect. There’s something in there about how much more genteel we’d all be if the South had one.

I always want to answer, ‘whatever you say, but the fact is I wouldn’t be reading this e-mail, dipshit, because your insistence on fetishizing the past means that if you’d won I’d be lucky to read anything from you out here in California, within six months of your writing it. Via Pony Express.’

Having said that, Flint’s analysis is sometimes facile, and his writing style is a bit too “genre” for my liking. But it’s not just an exercise in justifying either the writer’s or the reader’s preconceptions, which is (I think) your complaint about Turtledove.

As for Turtledove, I find his stuff unreadable.

I suppose historians of a certain cast of mind might dislike counterfactuals because they believe in great historical trends and inevitability, rather than contingency. So “What if Mason-Macfarlane had carried out his plan of shooting Hitler in 1935?” would be answered “Goering would have taken over as Fuhrer and the war would still have happened – German economic weakness and the reaction of the factory-owning classes against the workers made it inevitable”. For a Marxist-type historian, counterfactuals are just boring. For someone who believes in contingency and/or the Great Man theory, they’re fascinating.

You sound like an ex-smoker on this one, stickler! What other forms of fiction do you propose we exclude from our ideal republic?

Put down the Vaseline. Althistorical fiction is crap. Period, full stop. Worse than Star Wars novels. People who read it should take up masturbation as a hobby. Seriously. Right wing, left wing, right hand, left hand … same difference.

If the Black Death had wiped out Europe (hey, here’s a thought: it almost wiped out half of Europe in real life!), then Asia would have discovered America and the Aztecs would have died from the same damned smallpox the Spaniards actually brought.